Wednesday, October 14, 2015

Everything I Learned From Movies #eilfm

Good Afternoon Ladies & Gentlemen,

Tuesday night, we finished off the Softball regular season with a great barbecue and… a 24-12 victory over our biggest rival (another branch of the company). I didn’t play a whole lot as we had something like 15-16 players, but I did get one at-bat, single, and run it in. So… if memory serves me correctly, my regular season stats are 9-for-11 batting (all singles) with two walks, and 8 RBI, with 6 runs. That’s about 85% on base percentage… which ain’t bad at all, even in softball. Anyway, championships are on Tuesday but… I have a scheduling conflict with the SF Homebrewers Guild monthly meeting so… I’ll probably have to be there in spirit only. We shall see…

Saturday, Izzy & I helped out at the Meals on Wheels Fallfest Gala which is where dozens of vintners & high-profile restaurants in the Bay Area come down to Justin Herrmann Plaza near the Ferry Building to help raise money to feed the elderly. Annually, this event raises MILLIONS for this great cause & we’re always glad to help out in any way that we can.

The other night, we watched “The Relic” starring Tom Sizemore, Penelope Ann Miller, Linda Hunt and directed by Peter Hyams (“Timecop”, “End of Days”, “Sudden Death”, etc). This movie is essentially set in the Natural History Museum in Chicago… and is about a superstitious homicide detective (Sizemore) and an entirely too hot anthropologist (Miller) trying to find a vicious killer… and then discover that it’s actually a South American beetle-lizard god running a rampage in the museum (and nowhere else). The weird thing about watching this movie… is that I kept thinking that I had watched it last week when it was called “Mimic” and as I looked into it… yeah, it’s pretty much the same movie… released the same year (this one just a few months before in 1997) but yeah… some mysterious supernatural being is killing a lot of people in surprisingly dimly lit areas (not sure why no lights in the museum EVER, but subways at least made some sense) and there’s a superhot scientist in the middle of it all… but yeah, honestly if you’re going to watch one of these things, watch “Mimic”. This movie wasn’t good at all… well… you know, it wasn’t horrible… but yeah, you’ve seen the movie before or some cookie cutter version of it probably. Not a lot here… and the superstitious stuff was just irritating. Oh, you have a problem with black cats? Then you probably don’t want to be a f**king homicide detective in Chicago.

Sunday night, we watched a 1990 independent movie called “Hardware” starring Dylan McDermott & Stacey Travis, directed by Richard Stanley (the guy who was originally going to direct the 1990’s Island of Dr. Moreau disaster). The story is set in a bleak apocalyptic future that’s kind of Blade Runner meets Mad Max… it’s a barren red radioactive desert wasteland… but with gritty metal & wire kind of cities as well with toxic green rivers… and if there’s one thing about this movie that was REALLY impressive, it’s the atmosphere & setting this really f**ked-up future that global warming will apparently lead to. The red tones & darkness kind of make your eyes hurt, there’s a lot of quick subliminal shots that are just odd & upsetting, you can almost feel the dirt and broken glass and grime that this world has all around them. Anyway, in this future, there’s a scavenger who comes to town and sells a cyborg skull to another scavenger named Moses (McDermott) and he takes it to his ladyfriend (Travis)’s super-secured… I guess, art studio apartment… and she wants to use the skull as the center of one of her pieces that she does. Well, they soon find out that this skull can actually rebuild itself into a six-limbed killing machine. Now, this movie was… awkward to say the least. It’s a very unique & memorable world… and the ladyfriend is kind of a badass… and there are strange turns in the story where you’ll find yourself yelling at the screen… and there are some extremely violent, bloody scenes (was apparently cut a bit to become R rated in 1990) but overall, it’s actually a pretty twisted little sci-fi horror tale without being too predictable or cliché. I highly recommend watching it with some friends this Halloween season… and best of all, I’m pretty sure that none of your friends have seen this little flick. Fun game: See if you can spot Lemmy from Motorhead.

Monday night, Izzy & I hung out with my neighbor J-Mo and we watched “The Dead Lands” starring a mostly New Zealand / Maori cast. Essentially the movie starts at a peaceful Maori village… and they have visitors from another tribe / former rivals… so you know some sh*t is about to go down. Anyway, there’s a burial ground that’s sacred to the rival & they come back saying that the grounds have been desecrated, so basically… this means War. Well, instead under the guise of going back home, they attack like thieves in the night & slaughter the peaceful tribe, leaving behind only one teenage son of the chief who was able to escape. Now… the son wants revenge… but he’s just a boy, what can he do? Well… there’s a mythical monster in the area known as The Dead Lands who may be able to help him… if he/it doesn’t decide to just kill him. This movie… is awesome. It’s a total Man Movie with plenty of fighting involving blunt force trauma, cannibalism, tales of vengeance and honor, talking with dead people thanks to deprivation & mushrooms, but overall… it’s just a great hard hitting movie along the lines of “Apocalypto” a few years back where even with the “primitive” time setting & traditions involved… you find that it’s really still a human story just in their context & beliefs and beautifully shot (except some of the camera work with the fight scenes may cause seizures). I highly recommend checking it out if you can handle the little bit of gore & reading subtitles. Enjoy!

This weekend should prove epic… as Saturday is the Bay Area Mashers’ Sacramento Brewery Tour where we’re going to take a bus ride up to Sacramento to tour FOUR breweries… all four new to us… New Glory Craft Brewery, Device Brewing, Track 7 Brewing & Oak Park Brewing Company. Also, we’ll be introduced to other fellow homebrewers from the East Bay area… and it’s always good to spread the culture. The SF Homebrewers Guild’s Brewery Tour is coming up in December too… but more on that as we get closer.

Then on Sunday is the bottle sort portion for the California State Homebrew Competition which the San Francisco Homebrewers Guild is taking control over now… so yeah, a lot of awesome beer related things to come… as well as…

WE’RE FINALLY RELEASING OUR PODCAST TO THE WORLD!!!

We found a little time on Sunday to finally focus & get some structure to our podcast “format” and this podcast is called… EVERYTHING I LEARNED FROM MOVIES!!!#eilfm Yes, there’s some resemblance to the Audrey Hepburn quote (and book I think) “Everything that I learned I learned from movies” but essentially… to start, our podcast will include movies reviews, some beer talk, and we’re working out some of the musical aspects… but until then, you get to witness the beautiful harmony of our voices in accapella versions of theme music… and just trust me, you’re going to love it. Check it out! Our first episode… we review the new Netflix release “Tremors 5: Bloodlines”!